The best novels of 2016

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Tolstoy had it right. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he wrote in Anna Karenina. Which is one way of saying that nobody is interested in a fat novel about a perfectly balanced family unit. In a year of half-truths, post‑truths and downright lies, this at least remains incontestable: few subjects are more suited to fiction than family dysfunction.

Novelists in 2016 offered up appalling, needy or absent parents, manipulative or feckless children, a smattering of incest – and one vengeful foetus. There is no better chronicler of the modern British family than Zadie Smith. In Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99), her fifth novel, something terrible...